Jill DuffyProofHubProject management app ProofHub aims for simplicity without skimping on major features. Offering excellent tools at a competitive price, it should be on your short list if you run a small business.

Project management app ProofHub aims for simplicity without skimping on major features. Offering excellent tools at a competitive price, it should be on your short list if you run a small business.

ProofHub is an online project management app that helps teams organize projects and get work done. With an orderly interface and emphasis on simplicity, ProofHub delivers all the basics you need to manage a project. The price is right for a small and growing team, as ProofHub charges a flat monthly rate regardless of how many people use the account. Teamwork Projects and Zoho Projects have a lot of similarities with ProofHub, but they edge it out in terms of features and quality, making them PCMag Editors' Choices. If those services don't fit your needs, however, then ProofHub should make your short list of alternatives.

Price and Plans

ProofHub offers two plans, Essential and Ultimate Control, at two different price points. The company no longer advertises the availability of its truly free plan (with limitations), but you can still get it by requesting access via an email to support@proofhub.com. For the paid plans, the company charges a flat fee for an unlimited number of users, rather than charging per person. You can also get a free 30-day trial.

ProofHub Essential is the first tier of service. It costs $50 per month, or the equivalent of $45 per month when you pay for a year upfront, no matter how many people use it. It gives you the ability to manage 40 projects with 15GB of storage. It includes all the service's core features, such as time-tracking tools, group chat, project templates, file versioning, Gantt chart views, and so forth. Nothing essential is missing. It does not include many administration features, however, such as the ability to manage permissions through roles (admin, user, and client) or access to advanced activity logs.

ProofHub Ultimate Control costs $150 per month, or the equivalent of $135 per month when paid annually. The storage space increases to 100GB, and there's no limit on the number of projects you can manage, or how many people can use it. The Ultimate Control plan includes everything in Essential, plus administrative controls, API access, and priority support.

Some other project management apps also charge a flat monthly fee no matter how many people use them, including Zoho Projects and Teamwork Projects. Zoho Projects costs $50 per month for 50 projects and 100GB of storage, making it similar to, but a little more generous than, ProofHub Essential. Teamwork Projects charges more, but gives you a little more than ProofHub, too. A $69-per-month Small Business account lets you manage 50 projects with 20GB storage space.

Those prices are all very reasonable compared with what you might end up paying with other project management apps if you have a growing team. For example, Wrike costs almost $300 per person per year (which works out to be $24.80 per person per month, but you must pay annually). With just a few people on board, it ends up being much more expensive than ProofHub. Clarizen costs around $45 per user per month, with the company providing custom price quotes upon request.

TeamGantt and Volerro cost a bit less, at $14.95 per person per month and $19.99 per person per month, respectively, but the price still gets hefty if you have more than four or five people on your team.

A few other project management apps offer free plans, including Zoho Projects, Teamwork Projects, Wrike, TeamGantt, Volerro, and AceProject. These are good options if you are just getting your feet wet with project management and want to try out an app for an unlimited amount of time with just one or two projects. With most of these services, the free plan supports at most two projects.

Interface and Features

ProofHub's interface looks somewhat similar to Teamwork Projects', which is a compliment, although ProofHub could still use a bit more finesse. Visual cues are abundant. Heavy, solid colors give the space a creative but organized look. You can color-code both projects and tags for tasks. New activity from the current day gets a timestamp in a list of recent activities (e.g., 39 minutes ago), and that timestamp is highlighted. The issue I have is with the design itself. It could use some new fonts, resizing of components and text, and other visual tweaks to sharpen it and give it a more professional air. It's also not the most responsive web app. You often have to open new windows to get to the details of an item, and during my testing, it often went slower than I would have liked.

ProofHub doesn't complicate project management any more than necessary. When you set up an account, the app walks you through the basics of getting started by giving you a sample project. There are tasks that instruct you to check off tasks and files already uploaded awaiting your review and approval. Within a few minutes, nearly anyone can feel comfortable with the basics of ProofHub.

One odd thing happens when you first set up an account that has to do with pre-populated data. A bunch of introductory messages appear for other team members who join, and those messages are attributed to whoever set up the account (and presumably is the account administrator). For my account, my picture and name showed up on all these new messages. Some of the messages go into deep detail about how to use ProofHub.

In effect, it looks like the administrator—or CEO, or team lead, or whoever initiated the ProofHub account—is an expert about how to use the app when that person very well might not have a clue. Plus, ProofHub never tells that person about all the messages posted in her name. You only find out about them when you read them. It's just odd that the messages aren't attributed to "ProofHub Support" or a ProofHub bot or something of the sort.

Many conveniences are built in, including the ability to reorder tasks by dragging and dropping them, or creating dependencies between tasks in a Gantt view by drawing a line from one to the other. Yet sometimes simply editing text takes longer than it should. I tried many times in testing to click right on the text of a task to change it, only to realize I first have to open the item in a new window before any editing can occur. It's a minor design and user interface issue, but fixing it would go a long way to making the app seem more professional and current.

The service's task management tools are strong. You can add a lot of detail to any task, including estimated time to complete the task, labels (similar to tags), and documents that you upload to the task. ProofHub gives you a range of options when you want to check off a task as well. You can mark it In Progress, In Approval, or Done. Unfortunately, there's no option to create a recurring task. Zoho Projects offers a recurring option within its task-management tools. At least in ProofHub there is a recurring option when setting up a calendar event, like a weekly meeting, although it took some hunting for me to find it.

The Discussions area in many ways mirrors team chat apps because you can create opt-in channels or topics of discussion. There's a more classic chat app, too, where you can have quick one-on-one conversations or talk in small groups.

A Tasks view puts tasks in a list, where you can quickly scroll through them and select any one to see more details, such as the start date, due date, assignee, and any comments or files attached to it. I wish, however, that when looking at the Task view I could change the width of the different sections of the page. Unfortunately, they're all locked into place.

If your team uses a kanban work methodology, you can instead view tasks in a Board View, which is relatively new to ProofHub. Kanban is a style of working designed to limit the amount of work any one person takes on at a time. The Board View is a nice addition, but if your team relies heavily on kanban boards, you might instead pick up an app that specializes only in kanban, such as LeanKit, Trello, or Volerro.

You can also do Time tracking and and manage timesheets in ProofHub as well. You can enter time manually or by running a timer widget while working on a task. Time tracked on tasks can automatically feed into timesheets for each project or client you need to bill. You can also have your team track time just to keep an eye on how long tasks take to complete. Budgeting tools are not included, however.

ProofHub handles uploaded files better than many project management platforms. With some project management solutions, you have to download a file just to see what it is. In ProofHub, you can open the file right in the browser, add your comments while looking at the open file, and read comments left by others there, too. Every file also has an Approval button at the top of it that you can click, a simple and effortless way to get official signoff when needed. This section of ProofHub could still be slightly better if it were to include PDF- and image-markup tools, like highlighters or the ability to draw circles and lines on a file. Many people are have trouble explaining in text what they want to see changed in a visual file. Being able to draw on a file to point out specific items can make the task much easier.

I mentioned previously that one of ProofHub's strengths is its simplicity. If the kind of work you manage is far from simple, or your team is so large that you need a tool designed to handle complex scheduling and time-tracking situations, then a more apt app is LiquidPlanner. For growing teams with complex needs, LiquidPlanner is an exceptional tool for project management and scheduling. But it's the opposite of simple.

Apps and Integrations

ProofHub offers some integration with third-party tools, but not a ton. You can connect your account to Dropbox, Freshbooks, Google Drive, Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook Calendar. Support for third-party apps that assist with connectivity, such as Zapier and IFTTT is not available currently, although a representative of ProofHub says the company is aware of demand for it.

ProofHub offers apps for both Android and iOS. They provide a fairly simple way to keep in touch with the status of projects and communicate with colleagues while on the go.

Simple and Straightforward

ProofHub is a simple and reliable project management service that charges a fixed and fair monthly price, regardless of how many people use the account. It's especially compelling for small and growing businesses. It could use minor improvements in its interface, and it could add a few extras, like the ability to make a task recurring integration with IFTTT and Zapier. Otherwise, however, it's just about on par with Editors' Choice project management services Zoho Projects and Teamwork Projects.

ProofHub

Bottom Line: Project management app ProofHub aims for simplicity without skimping on major features. Offering excellent tools at a competitive price, it should be on your short list if you run a small business.

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About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

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